Illustrating Webster

Frank I. Stanton's comic strip demonstrates the visual vocabulary that shaped early newspaper comics: a single-panel gag with speech balloon, exaggerated caricature, and wordplay on a dictionary definition. The format—a man confused by the abstract concept of "votes for women"—exemplifies how Sunday supplement cartoons of the 1910s used simplified line work and domestic or workplace settings to deliver topical humor. Stanton was among the cartoonists who established panel layout, expressive lettering, and visual hierarchy as the language of American comics, bridging the gap between single-panel newspaper gags and the sequential storytelling that would define the medium.